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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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“Who is Mark
Noll?” was an awkward question coming from an academic administrator, accented by
his dazed look when I mentioned Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I left
that Christian campus with mixed feelings, appreciative of meeting goodhearted
professors but pricked deeply by that conversation—his obvious unawareness of a
leading Christian thinker.

I have found myself in
his role, such as sharing the speaking platform with Martin Bernal before reading
his Black Athena. Even more uncomfortable was sitting in England’s
famous “pump room” at Bath prior to reading Northanger Abbey while being
surrounded by Jane Austin veterans—my students.

Well, according to one French
literary superstar, we need not feel guilty anymore.

Author Pierre Bayard, a
professor of literature at the University of Paris VIII, suggests that we often
find ourselves in the dialogue of the deaf. We discuss books unread by
others or ourselves, or the fragments we recall from others’ recollections. He
cogently argues that when we skim books we usually are left with a memory of “a
different book” than the one recalled by other readers or intended by the
author. Bayard finds professors especially feeling guilty for not having read
an even longer list of books. Rather, we should be more concerned with being
able to place a key author or book in the appropriate place on the shelf of our
collective library—the collection of books common to our extended
community. These are the big books we all should know.

He intrigues us with his
veneer of sincerity in dealing with the constraints we feel as readers. The
first constraint is that we’re under “the obligation to read” with special
attention to a “canonical list” of any given community. During his beloved
postmodern era, most “great books” lists prove problematic. Though the “canon”
surviving the Middles Ages and enshrined during Modernity resonated with
millions of readers seeking answers about the human condition, postmodern
“classics” lists include everything from Proust and Clancy to cookbooks and
ecology guides. Author Nick Rennison accents this subjective list approach with
his collection of 100-Must Read series ranging from Classic Novels and
Crime Novels to Science Fiction. A second constraint is “the
obligation to read a book in its entirety,” which is commonly violated by
fast-paced schedules. To compound matters, the third constraint is the
academy’s expectation that in order to discuss a book we must have read it.

Bayard’s imagery seems
to work prima facie as the proliferation of books keeps our heads
spinning. Bayard’s literary illustrations provide context for his strategy,
allegedly being transparent about his own time with the respective texts, e.g.,
citations are marked with “SB” = skimmed book, “UB” = unknown, “FB” = forgotten,
“++” = extremely positive, “+” = positive, etc. It’s as if Woody Allen
subscripts pop-up with the truth about Bayard’s reading life, accenting Oscar
Wilde’s boast, “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”
Bayard contends that “it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation
about a book you haven’t read — including, and perhaps especially, with someone
else who hasn’t read it either.”

From The Man Without
Qualities,Bayard has us follow a laughable love-struck General
Stumm into his country’s imperial library. He intended to become educated to
impress a woman until realizing it would take over ten thousand years to read
all of the library’s books, and that’s if writing stopped. This sense of
hopelessness resonates with academics as we walk up to Claremont’s Honnold/Mudd
Library or approach the Widener’s steps. The Education section alone at Miami University’s (OH) King Library is beyond one’s reading capacity, and the same with
the New York City Public Library’s World War II collection.

The disheveled old
librarian, Bayard’s hero, reveals to Stumm his secret for keeping his large
collection in perspective—he doesn’t read any of them, only the catalogues.
“His love of books—of all books—incites him to remain prudently on the
periphery, for fear that too pronounced an interest in one of them might cause
him to neglect the others.”

I suppose there’s some
freedom in this perspective. And likewise most of us have our favorite lit reviews,
such as Books & Culture, Times Literary Supplement, Image, Christian
Scholar’s Review, The Chronicle Review, The Atlantic, The Virginia Quarterly
Review and NewPages.com (which will introduce you to dozens more). So maybe
Bayard is on to something with his notion of prioritizing the place of these
books in the library—important titles on the right shelves, associated with the
right schools of thought.

His best contribution to
our reading peril, and an image that has staying power, is his notion of our “inner
library” developed in his section on “Encounters in Society.” These are books
we’ve actually read or have a confident familiarity with—“around which every
personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual
relationship to books and to other people.” When we brush up against someone
without familiarity with one of our titles, or with no or very limited overlap
with inner libraries, we find ourselves in awkward situations. We should be
more concerned about a book’s place among the “collective library” than whether
we read it thoroughly. Bayard argues that “we never talk about a book unto itself,”
but a whole set of books. Each title “serves as a temporary symbol for a
complete conception of culture.” Allegedly these inner libraries “have made us
who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering.”
For a book championing non-reading, the previous statement is in tension with
his own thinking.

This clever book accents
the ingenuity of Bayard, also author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? But
don’t be snookered with the whole enterprise. Like Thoreau’s Walden,
Bayard lacks full disclosure and has readers (and reviewers) believing that he
actually doesn’t read books. This is asinine—he’s an esteemed literature
professor!

But here’s the main rub.
Bayard positions reading as a social gauge, for hobnobbing at cocktail parties
and impressing peers. If education targets such shallow ends, then we might as
well scrap books altogether and save additional time learning his antics of
non-reading. At the least, if our main concern (as Bayard argues) is social acceptance
we could limit our reading to Michael Dirda’s entertaining Classics for Pleasure.

Bayard’s book is painted
in a counterintuitive hue, another rub. He leans heavily on Oscar Wilde’s Artist
as Critic and To Read or Not To Read, which evidently he’s digested
a few times in preparation for this treatise on doing just the opposite—“anti”
or “non” reading.My readers group, local Inklings of sorts, asked me,
“Did you read the book before reviewing it?”

There’s a literary
swagger in Bayard’s boast about non-reading, and references to various social exchanges
that venerate crafty wordsmithing and psychoanalysis over careful reading. One
illustration from David Lodge’s Changing Places includes the game
“Humiliation” in which rivaling professors attempt to persuade others of books
they haven’t read, often with details heard secondhand. The winner is the one
telling the biggest lie and fooling the most.

Though a worthwhile
read, the book fizzles as Bayard wades in the same relativistic waters tread by
Stanley Fish. Bayard attempts to establish a case for our “inner books,” much
akin to Fish’s “interpretive communities.” Books, according to Bayard, take on
special meaning to each person, and the intended meaning remains unknowable to
anyone. He argues that “we must profoundly transform our relationship to
books,” and “accept a kind of evolution of our psychology.... what is essential
is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by
way of books.” This quintessential existential approach can make a historian
like me queasy, and rips the “non” out of “the law of non-contradiction.”

The climax of this
suspect trajectory is Bayard’s claim that in the art of non-reading we become
creators. The most important thing is that the books are about us, and this
gives us the freedom to create our own text (see page 180).

This fun book with
helpful observations goes awry here, offering what Jay McInerney calls a
“nonreading utopia”—“a charming but ultimately terrifying prospect—a world full
of writers and artists” (New York Times, 11 November 2007). Bayard’s
model has us affixing gelatin manuscripts to a revolving Wittenberg Door without
nails—or anything else that’s objectively real. Though we begin with practical
help for daunting reading expectations (his useful concepts of inner libraries
and veneration of lit reviews), we end with theories more conflicting than
those gems in Alan Sokal’s hoax (in Social Text, 1996). The only difference
is that Sokal intended to write camouflaged nonsense littered with ideological
jargon pleasing to reviewers.

While I recommend
Bayard’s book, don’t be hoodwinked by his mythical author status. Unlike the unnamed
narrator in The Bleak House, the first-person is not really
Bayard—though his writing finesse creates a voice as believable as other
fictional male protagonists like J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Chaim Potok’s
Asher Lev. Bayard seems to be following Wilde’s literary mentoring, “Man is
least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will
tell you the truth” (Intentions).

Another objection to
Bayard’s thesis is his omission of the love of reading. It splits one’s
dendrites to think (as Fish also seems to imply) that one can venerate the art
of writing without studying it. While the usefulness of the humanities and the
rationale for its place in college curricula is a debate for another time, the
love of literature is not.

To miss Jane Austin’s
defense of novels while describing Catherine and Isabella’s relationship forged
in the details of Bath is to miss the author. To miss the hundreds of T. Harry
William’s vignettes of the “wild man” days is to miss the magnetism of Huey
Long, “a demagogue and a clown” who once answered the door naked and while
drunk, convincing the foreign ambassador it was an American custom. To opt for Cliffs
Notes or reviews of Dorian Gray is to miss a truth articulated about
vanity and hubris, and Dorian’s constant tension of thinking about “the
desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas.” Or the plea for
sensibility by Basil Howard, Gray’s painter, to a hallow-souled Gray hours
after the poisonous death of Gray’s lover (fittingly named, Sibyl Vane). The
trajectory of Bayard’s “creator” thesis would evolve millions of Patroclus figures
dying for reasons other than for an arrogant Achilles’ plight that for two
millennia has resonated with the human condition. Likewise, in the nonreading
scheme a secondhand Hamlet is stripped of its appeal and “My Queen”
becomes platonic. And lesser gems lose all sense of place on the shelf, such
as, Dubner’s Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper, with its vivid images of
Franco Harris’s life-giving presence in everyday, nondescript Pittsburg.

Imagine the shallowness
of Bayard’s cocktail party chatter about a Bible not firmly in their inner libraries,
boasting the theme of Easter but unaware of the conversations on the cross,
recounting parables’ points without understanding their purpose. And imagine
churches led by preachers excelling in non-reading, vague passionless homilies
from clerics that can place the Bible on the right shelf, but with little
edification for the self as a whole. And for those imbibing his views of an
inner book with changing meaning, meaningless sermons for changing times.

There are many more
important questions than “Who is Mark Noll?” But it’s in his Scandal where
Christians find a well-reasoned challenge to return to their heritage of
intellectual rigor, to contribute to the “first-order public discourse” and to
cultivate scholarly attitudes with “the seriousness that God intends.” Establishing
strong inner libraries is an important step in this direction, but in addition
to and not in place of an aggressive reading schedule.

And if I’m right,
reading in between and the lines themselves, I think that’s what Bayard is
suggesting, though for a much less spiritual cause.